Spiritual Ground of Education

Schmidt Number: S-4956

On-line since: 26th August 2004

V

HOW KNOWLEDGE CAN BE NURTURE

If the process of the change of teeth in a child is gradual even more
gradual is that great transformation in the bodily, psychic and
spiritual organism of which I have already spoken. Hence, in education
it is important to remember that the child is gradually changing from
an imitative being into one who looks to the authority of an educator,
of a teacher. Thus we should make no abrupt transition in the
treatment of a child in its seventh year or so — at the age, that
is, at which we receive it for education in the primary school.
Anything further that is said here on primary school education must be
understood in the light of this proviso.

In the art of education with which we are here concerned the main
thing is to foster the development of the child's inherent capacities.
Hence all instruction must be at the service of education. The task
is, properly speaking, to educate; and instruction is made use of as a
means of educating.

This educational principle demands that the child shall develop the
appropriate relation to life at the appropriate age. But this can only
be done satisfactorily when the child is not required at the very
outset to do something which is foreign to its nature.

Now it is a thoroughly unnatural thing to require a child in its sixth
or seventh year to copy without more ado the signs which we now, in
this advanced stage of civilisation, use for reading and writing.

If you consider the letters we now use for reading and writing, you
will realise that there is no connection between what a seven-year old
child is naturally disposed to do — and these letters. Remember,
that when men first began to write they used painted or drawn signs
which copied things or happenings in the surrounding world; or else
men wrote from out of will impulses, so that the forms of writing gave
expression to processes of the will, as for example in cuneiform. The
entirely abstract forms of letters which the eye must gaze at
nowadays, or the hand form, arose from out of picture writing. If we
confront a young child with these letters we are bringing to him an
alien thing, a thing which in no wise conforms to his nature. Let us
be clear what this ‘pushing’ of a foreign body into a
child's organism really means. It is just as if we habituated the
child from his earliest years to wearing very small clothes, which do
not fit and which therefore damage his organism. Nowadays when
observation tends to be superficial, people do not even perceive what
damage is done to the organism by the mere fact of introducing reading
and writing to the child in a wrong way. An art of education founded
in a knowledge of man does truly proceed by drawing out all that is in
the child. It does not merely say: the individuality must be
developed, it really does it. And this is achieved firstly by not
taking reading as the starting point. For with a child the first
things are movements, gestures, expressions of will, not perception or
observation. These come later. Hence it is necessary to begin, not
with reading, but with writing — but a writing which shall come
naturally from man's whole being.

Hence, we begin with writing lessons, not reading lessons, and we
endeavour to lead over what the child does of its own accord out of
imitation, through its will, through its hands, into writing. Let me
make it clear to you by an example: We ask the child to say the word
“fish,” for instance, and while doing so, show him the form
of the fish in a simple sketch; then ask him to copy it; — thus
we get the child to experience the word “fish.” From
“fish” we pass to f (F), and from the form of the fish we
can gradually evolve the letter f. Thus we derive the form of the
letter by an artistic activity which carries over what is observed
into what is willed:

Click image for large view

By this means we avoid introducing an utterly alien F, a thing which
would affect the child like a demon, something foreign thrust into his
body; and instead we call forth from him the thing he has seen himself
in the market place. And this we transform little by little into
‘ f .’

In this way we come near to the way writing originated, for it arose
in a manner similar to this. But there is no need for the teacher to
make a study of antiquity and exactly reproduce the way picture
writing arose so as to give it in the same manner to the child. What
is necessary is to give the rein to living fantasy and to produce
afresh whatever can lead over from the object, from immediate life, to
the letter forms. You will then find the most manifold ways of
deriving the letter form for the child from life itself. While you say
M let him feel how the M vibrates on the lips, then get him to see the
shape of the lips as form, then you will be able to pass over
gradually from the M that vibrates on the lips to M.

Click image for large view

In this way, if you proceed spiritually, imaginatively, and not
intellectually, you will gradually be able to derive from the child's
own activity, all that leads to his learning to write. He will learn
to write later and more slowly than children commonly do to-day. But
when parents come and say: My child is eight, or nine years old, and
cannot yet write properly, we must always answer: What is learned more
slowly at any given age is more surely and healthily absorbed by the
organism, than what is crammed into it.

Along these lines, moreover, there is scope for the individuality of
the teacher, and this is an important con-sideration. As we now have
many children in the Waldorf School we have had to start parallel
classes — thus we have two first classes, two second classes and
so on. If you go into one of the first classes you will find writing
being taught by way of painting and drawing. You observe how the
teacher is doing it. For instance, it might be just as we have been
describing here. Then you go into the other Class I., Class I. B; and
you find another teacher teaching the same subject. But you see
something quite different. You find the teacher letting the children
run round in a kind of eurhythmy, and getting them to experience the
form from out of their own bodily movements. Then what the child runs
is retained as the form of the letter. And it is possible to do it in
yet a third and a fourth manner. You will find the same subject taught
in the most varied ways in the different parallel classes. Why? Well,
because it is not a matter of indifference whether the teacher who has
to take a lesson has one temperament or another. The lesson can only
be harmonious when there is the right contact between the teacher and
the whole class. Hence every teacher must give his lesson in his own
way. And just as life appears in manifold variety so can a teaching
founded in life take the most varied forms.

Usually, when pedagogic principles are laid down it is expected that
they shall be carried out. They are written down in a book. The good
teacher is he who carries them out punctiliously, 1, 2, 3, etc. Now I
am convinced that if a dozen men, or even fewer, sit down together
they can produce the most wonderful programme for what should take
place in education; firstly, secondly, thirdly, etc. People are so
wonderfully intelligent nowadays; — I am not being sarcastic, I
really mean it — one can think out the most splendid things in
the abstract. But whether it is possible to put into practice what one
has thought out is quite another matter. That is a concern of
Life. And when we have to deal with life, — I ask you now,
life is in all of you, natural life, you are all human beings, yet you
all look different. No one man's hair is like another's. Life displays
its variety in the manifold varieties of form. Each man has a
different face. If you lay down abstract principles, you expect to
find the same thing done in every class room. If your principles are
taken from life, you know that life is various, and that the same
thing can be done in the most varied ways. You see, for instance, that
Negroes must be regarded as human beings, and in them the human form
appears quite differently. In the same way when the art of education
is held as a living art, all pedantry and also every kind of formalism
must be avoided. And education will be true when it is really made
into an art, and when the teacher is made into an
artist. It is thus possible for us in the Waldorf School to
teach writing by means of art. Then reading can be learned afterwards
almost as a matter of course, without effort. It comes rather later
than is customary, but it comes almost of itself.

While we are concerned on the one hand in bringing the pictorial
element to the child — (and during the next few days I shall be
showing you something of the paintings of the Waldorf School children)
— while we are engaged with the pictorial element, we must also
see to it that the musical element is appreciated as early as
possible. For the musical element will give a good foundation for a
strong energetic will, especially when attention is paid — at
this stage — not so much to musical content as to the rhythm and
beat of the music, the experience of rhythm and beat; and especially
when it is treated in the right manner at the beginning of the
elementary school period. I have already said in the introduction to
the eurhythmy demonstration that we also introduce eurhythmy into
children's education. I shall be speaking further of eurhythmy, and in
particular of eurhythmy in education, in a later lecture. For the
moment I wished to show more by one or two examples how early
instruction serves the purpose of education in so far as it is called
out of the nature of the human being.

But we must bear in mind that in the first part of the stage between
the change of teeth and puberty a child can by no means distinguish
between what is inwardly human and what is external nature. For him up
to his eighth or ninth year these two things are still merged into
one. Inwardly the child feels a certain impression, outwardly he may
see a certain phenomenon, for instance a sunrise. The forces he feels
in himself when he suffers unhappiness or pain; he supposes to be in
sun or moon, in tree or plant. We should not reason the child out of
this. We must transpose ourselves into the child's stage of life and
conduct everything within education as if no boundary existed as yet
between inner man and outer nature. This we can only do when we form
the instruction as imaginatively as possible, when we let the plants
act in a human manner — converse with other plants, and so on,
— when we introduce humanity everywhere. People have a horror
nowadays of Anthropomorphism, as it is called. But the child who has
not experienced anthropomorphism in its relation to the world will be
lacking in humanity in later years. And the teacher must be willing to
enter into his environment with his full spirit and soul so that the
child can go along with him on the strength of this living experience.

Now all this implies that a great deal shall have happened to the
teacher before he enters the classroom. The carrying through of the
educational principles of which we have been speaking makes great
demands on the preparation the teachers have to do. One must do as
much as one possibly can before-hand when one is a teacher, in order
to make the best use of the time in the class room. This is a thing
which the teacher learns to do only gradually, and in course of time.
And only through this slow and gradual learning can one come really to
have a true regard for the child's individuality.

May I mention a personal experience in this connection, Years before
my connection with the Waldorf School I had to concern myself with
many different forms of education. Thus it happened that when I was
still young myself I had corded to me the education of a boy of eleven
years old who was exceedingly backward in his development. Up to that
time he had lied nothing at all. In proof of his attainment I was
shown an exercise book containing the results of the latest
examination he had been pushed into. All that was to be seen in it was
an enormous hole that he had scrubbed with the india-rubber; nothing
else. Added to this the boy's domestic habits were of a pathological
nature. The whole family was unhappy on his account, for they could
not bring themselves to abandon him to a manual occupation — a
social prejudice, if you like, but these prejudices have to be
reckoned with. So the whole family was unhappy. The family doctor was
quite explicit that nothing could be made of the boy. I was now given
four children of this family to educate. The others were normal, and I
was to educate this one along with them. I said: I will try — in
a case like this one can make no promises that this or the other
result will be achieved, — but I would do everything that lay
within my power, only I must be left complete freedom in the matter of
the education. So now I undertook this education. The mother was the
only member of the family who understood my stipulation for freedom,
so that the education had to be fought for him in the teeth of the
others. But finally the instruction of the boy was confided to me. It
was necessary that the time spent in immediate instruction of the boy
should be as brief as possible. Thus if I had, say, to be engaged in
teaching the boy for about half-an-hour, I had to do three hours' work
in preparation so as to make the most economical use of the time.
Moreover, I had to make careful note of the time of the music lesson,
for example. For if the boy were overtaxed he turned pale and his
health deteriorated. But because one understood the boy's whole
pathological condition, because one knew what was to be set down to
hydrocephalus, it was possible to make such progress with the boy
— and not psychical progress only, — that a year and a half
after he had shown up merely a hole rubbed in his exercise book, he
was able to enter the Gymnasium. (Name given to the Scientific and
Technical School as distinct from the Classical.) And I was further
able to help him throughout the classes of the Gymnasium and follow up
the work with him until near the end of his time there, Under the
influence of this education, and also because everything was
spiritually directed, the boy's head became smaller. I know a doctor
might say perhaps his head would have become smaller in any case.
Certainly, but the right nurture of spirit and soul had to go with
this process of getting smaller. The person referred to subsequently
became an excellent doctor. He died during the war in the exercise of
his profession, but only when he was nearly forty years old.

It was particularly important here to achieve the greatest economy in
the time of instruction by means of suitable preparation beforehand.
Now this must become a general principle. And in the art of education
of which I am here speaking this is striven for. Now, when it is a
question of describing what we have to tell the children in such a way
as to arouse life and liveliness in their whole being, we mast master
the subject thoroughly beforehand and be so at home with the matter
that we can turn all our attention and individual power to the form in
which we shall present it to the child. And then we shall discover as
a matter of course that all the stuff of teaching must become
pictorial if a child is to grasp it not only with his intellect but
with his whole being. Hence we mostly begin with tales such as fairy
tales, but also with other invented stories which relate to Nature. We
do not at first teach either language or any other
“subject,” but we simply unfold the world itself in vivid
and pictorial form before the child. And such instruction is the best
preparation for the writing and reading which is to be derived
imaginatively.

Thus between his ninth and tenth year the child comes to be able to
express himself in writing, and also to read as far as is healthy for
him at this age, and now we have reached that important point in a
child's life, between his ninth and tenth year, to which I have
already referred. Now you must realise that this important point in
the child's life has also an outward manifestation. At this time quite
a remarkable change takes place, a remarkable differentiation, between
girls and boys. Of the particular significance of this in a
co-educational school such as the Waldorf School, I shall be speaking
later. In the meantime we must be aware that such a differentiation
between boys and girls does take place. Thus, round about the tenth
year girls begin to grow at a quicker rate than the boys. Growth in
boys is held back. Girls overtake the boys in growth. When the boys
and girls reach puberty the boys once more catch up with the girls in
their growth. Thus just at that stage the boys grow more rapidly.

Between the tenth and fifteenth year the outward differentiation
between girls and boys is in itself a sign that a significant period
of life has been reached. What appears inwardly is the clear
distinction between oneself and the world. Before this time there was
no such thing as a plant, only a green thing with red flowers in which
there is a little spirit just as there is a little spirit in
ourselves. As for a “plant,” such a thing only makes sense
for a child about its tenth year. And here we must be able to follow
his feeling. Thus, only when a child reaches this age is it right to
teach him of an external world of our surroundings.

One can make a beginning for instance with botany — that great
stand-by of schools. But it is just in the case of botany that I can
demonstrate how a formal education — in the best sense of the
word — should be conducted. If we start by showing a child a
single plant we do a thoroughly unnatural thing, for that is not a
whole. A plant especially when it is rooted up, is not a whole thing.
In our realistic and materialistic age people have little sense for
what is material and natural otherwise they would feel what I have
just said. Is a plant a whole thing? No, when we have pulled it up and
fetched it here it very soon withers. It is not natural to it to be
pulled up. Its nature is to be in the earth, to belong with the soil.
A stone is a totality by itself. It can lie about anywhere and it
makes no difference. But I cannot carry a plant about all over the
place; it will not remain the same. Its nature is only complete in
conjunction with the soil, with the forces that spring from the earth,
and with all the forces of the sun which fall upon this particular
portion of the earth. Together with these the plant makes a totality.
To look upon a plant in isolation is as absurd as if we were to pull
out a hair of our head and regard the hair as a thing in itself. The
hair only arises in connection with an organism and cannot be
understood apart from the organism. Therefore: In the teaching of
botany we must take our start, not from the plant, or the plant family
but from the landscape, the geographical region: from an
understanding of what the earth is in a particular place. And the
nature of plants must be treated in relation to the whole earth.

When we speak of the earth we speak as physicists, or at most as
geologists. We assume that the earth is a totality of physical forces,
mineral forces, self-enclosed, and that it could exist equally well if
there were no plants at all upon it, no animals at all, no men at all.
But this is an abstraction. The earth as viewed by the physicist, by
the geologist, is an abstraction. There is in reality no such thing.
In reality there is only the earth which is covered with plants. We
must be aware when we are describing from a geological aspect that,
purely for the convenience of our intelligence, we are describing a
non-existent abstraction. But we must not start by giving a child an
idea of this non-existent abstraction, we must give the child a
realisation of the earth as a living organism, beginning naturally
with the district which the child knows. And then, just as we should
show him an animal with hair growing upon it, and not produce a hair
for it to see before it knew anything of the animal — so must we
first give him a vivid realisation of the earth as a living organism
and after that show him how plants live and grow upon the earth.

Thus the study of plants arises naturally from introducing the earth
to the child as a living thing, as an organism — beginning with a
particular region. To consider one part of the earth at a time,
however, is an abstraction, for no region of the earth can exist apart
from the other regions; and we should be conscious that we take our
start from something incomplete. Nevertheless, if, once more we teach
pictorially and appeal to the wholeness of the imagination the child
will be alive to what we tell him about the plants. And in this way we
gradually introduce him to the external world. The child acquires a
sense of the concept “objectivity.” He begins to live into
reality. And this we achieve by introducing the child in this natural
manner to the plant kingdom.

The introduction to the animal kingdom is entirely different — it
comes somewhat later. Once more, to describe the single animals is
quite inorganic. For actually one could almost say: It is sheer chance
that a lion is a lion and a camel a camel. A lion presented to a
child's contemplation will seem an arbitrary object however well it
may be described, or even if it is seen in a menagerie. So will a
camel. Observation alone makes no sense in the domain of life.

How are we to regard the animals? Now, anyone who can contemplate the
animals with imaginative vision, instead of with the abstract
intellect, will find each animal to be a portion of the human being.
In one animal the development of the legs will predominate —
whereas in man they are at the service of the whole organism. In
another animal the sense organs, or one particular sense organ, is
developed in an extreme manner. One animal will be specially adapted
for snouting and routing (snuffling), another creature is specially
gifted for seeing, when aloft in the air. And when we take the whole
animal kingdom together we find that what outwardly constitutes the
abstract divisions of the animal kingdom is comprised in its totality
in man. All the animals taken together, synthetically, give one the
human being. Each capacity or group of faculties in the human being is
expressed in a one-sided form in some animal species. When we study
the lion — there is no need to explain this to the child, we can
show it to him in simple pictures — when we study the lion we
find in the lion a particular over-development of what in the human
being are the chest organs, the heart organ. The cow shows a one-sided
development of what in man is the digestive system. And when I examine
the white corpuscles in the human blood I see the indication of the
earliest, most primitive creatures. The whole animal kingdom together
makes up man, synthetically, not symptomatically, but synthetically
woven and interwoven.

All this I can expound to the child in quite a simple, primitive way.
Indeed I can make the thing very vivid when speaking, for instance, of
the lion's nature and showing how it needs to be calmed and subdued by
the individuality of man. Or one can take the moral and psychic
characteristics of the camel and show how what the camel presents in a
lower form is to be found in human nature. So that man is a synthesis
of lion, eagle, ape, of camel, cow and all the rest. We view the whole
animal kingdom as human nature separated out and spread abroad.

This, then, is the other side which the child gets when he is in his
eleventh or twelfth year. After he has learned to separate himself
from the plant world, to experience its objectivity and its connection
with an objective earth, he then learns the close connection between
the animals and man, the subjective side. Thus the universe is once
more brought into connection with man, by way of the feelings. And
this is educating the child by contact with life in the world.

Then we shall find that the requirements we always make are met
spontaneously. In theory we can keep on saying: You must not overload
the memory. It is not a good thing to burden the child's memory.
Anyone can see that in the abstract. It is less easy for people to see
clearly what effect the overburdening of memory has on a man's life.
It means this, that later in life we shall find him suffering from
rheumatism and gout — it is a pity that medical observation does
not cover the whole span of a man's life, but indeed we shall find
many people afflicted with rheumatism and gout, to which they had no
predisposition; or else what was a very slight predisposition has been
in-creased because the memory was overtaxed, because one had learned
too much from memory. But, on the other hand, the memory must not be
neglected. For if the memory is not exercised enough inflammatory
conditions of the physical organs will be prone to arise, more
particularly between the 16th and 24th years.

And how are we to hold the balance between burdening the memory too
much or too little? When we teach pictorially and imaginatively, as I
have described, the child takes as much of the instruction as it can
bear. A relationship arises like that between eating and being
satisfied. This means that we shall have some children further
advanced than others, and this we must deal with, without relegating
less advanced children to a class below. One may have a comparatively
large class and yet a child will not eat more than it can bear —
spiritually speaking — because its organism spontaneously rejects
what it cannot bear. Thus we take account of life here, just as we
draw our teaching from life.

A child is able to take in the elements of Arithmetic at quite an
early age. But in arithmetic we observe how very easily an
intellectual element can be given the child too soon. Mathematics as
such is alien to no man at any age. It arises in human nature; the
operations of mathematics are not foreign to human faculty in the way
letters are foreign in a succeeding civilisation. But it is
exceedingly important that the child should be introduced to
arithmetic and mathematics in the right way. And what this is can
really only be decided by one who is enabled to overlook the whole of
human life from a certain spiritual standpoint.

There are two things which in logic seem very far removed from one
another: arithmetic and moral principles. It is not usual to hitch
arithmetic on to moral principles because there seems no obvious
logical connection between them. But it is apparent to one who looks
at the matter, not logically, but livingly, that the child who has a
right introduction to arithmetic will have quite a different feeling
of moral responsibility from the child who has not. And — this
may seem extremely paradoxical to you, but since I am speaking of
realities and not of the illusions current in our age, I will not be
afraid of seeming paradoxical, for in this age truth often seems
paradoxical. — If, then, men had known how to permeate the soul
with mathematics in the right way during these past years we should
not now have bolshevism in Eastern Europe. This it is that one
perceives: what forces connect the faculty used in arithmetic with the
springs of morality in man.

Now, you will understand this better probably if I give you a very
small illustration of the principles of arithmetic teaching. It is
common nowadays to start arithmetic by the adding of one thing to
another. But just consider how foreign a thing it is to the human mind
to add one pea to another and at each addition to name a new name. The
transition from one to two, and then to three, — this counting is
quite an arbitrary activity for the human being. But it is possible to
count in another way. And this we find when we go back a little in
human history. For originally people did not count by putting one pea
to another and hence deriving a new thing which, for the soul at all
events, had little connection with what went before. No, men counted
more or less in the following way: They would say: What we get in life
is always a whole, something to be grasped as a whole; and the most
diverse things can constitute a unity. If I have a number of people in
front of me, that can be a unity at first sight. Or if I have a single
man in front of me, he then is a unity. A unity, in reality, is a
purely relative thing. And I keep this in mind if I count in the
following way: One | = | two | = | = | three | = | = | = | four | = |
= | =| = | and so on, that is, when I have an organic whole (a whole
consisting of members): because then I am starting with unity, and in
the unity, viewed as a multiplicity, I seek the parts. This indeed was
the original view of number. Unity was always a totality, and in the
totality one sought for the parts. One did not think of numbers as
arising by the addition of one and one and one, one conceived of the
numbers as belonging to the whole, and proceeding organically from the
whole.

When we apply this to the teaching of arithmetic we get the following:
Instead of placing one bean after another beside the child, we throw
him a whole heap of beans. The bean heap constitutes the whole. And
from this we make our start. And now we can explain to the child: I
have a heap of beans — or if you like, so that it may the better
appeal to the child's imagination: a heap of apples, — and three
children of different ages who need different amounts to eat, and we
want to do something which applies to actual life. What shall we do?
Now we can for instance, divide the heap of apples in such a way as to
give a certain heap on the one hand and portions, together equal to
the first heap, on the other. The heap represents the sum. Here we
have the heap of apples, and we say: Here are three parts, and we get
the child to see that the sum is the same as the three parts. The sum
= the three parts. That is to say, in addition we do not go from the
parts to arrive at the sum, but we start with the sum and proceed to
the parts. Thus to get a living understanding of addition we start
with the whole and proceed to the addenda, to the parts. For addition
is concerned essentially with the sum and its parts, the members which
are contained, in one way or another, within the sum.

In this way we get the child to enter into life with the ability to
grasp a whole, not always to proceed from the less to the greater. And
this has an extraordinarily strong influence upon the child's whole
soul and mind. When a child has acquired the habit of adding things
together we get a disposition which tends to be desirous and craving.
In proceeding from the whole to the parts, and in treating
multiplication similarly, the child has less tendency to
acquisitiveness, rather it tends to develop what, in the Platonic
sense, the noblest sense of the word, can be called
considerateness, moderation. And one's moral likes and dislikes
are intimately bound up with the manner in which one has learned to
deal with number. At first sight there seems to be no logical
connection between the treatment of numbers and moral ideas, so little
indeed that one who will only regard things from the intellectual
point of view, may well laugh at the idea of any connection. It may
seem to him absurd. We can also well understand that people may laugh
at the idea of proceeding in addition from the sum instead of from the
parts. But when one sees the true connections in life one knows that
things which are logic-ally most remote are often in reality
exceedingly near.

Thus what comes to pass in the child's soul by working with numbers
will very greatly affect the way he will meet us when we want to give
him moral examples, deeds and actions for his liking or disliking,
sympathy with the good, antipathy with the evil. We shall have before
us a child susceptible to goodness when we have dealt with him in the
teaching of numbers in the way described.